Activism and Social Networks
Posted by Kevin
One of our primary goals at Causes is to make it easier for anyone to become an activist. Why then, are we building Facebook and MySpace applications?
Activism is an inherently social endeavor: the decision to begin donating or volunteering is one that historically has flowed through networks of friends. The practice of grassroots organizing is predicated on the idea of getting to know one person and having that person reach out through their friends. In fact, for most people, their entire engagement with a political campaign or nonprofit is through their friends and family.
There are many examples of this. Think of the grandmother making her first political donation ever to the Obama campaign because her grandson’s excitement inspires her; or the group of recent college grads helping Habitat for Humanity build a house as a social outing and a way to keep hanging out; or the parents who start conserving energy and reading about global warming because their daughter brings home a CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) from school. All of these are examples of social relationships leading to increased engagement and activism or contributions.
These relationships are exactly what social networks like Facebook and MySpace are trying to capture. They’re not trying to replace real-life social networks, but rather provide a virtual overlay on top of them that can be used to extend, facilitate, and enrich those relationships. Their success may be arguable, but the goal is clear: they want to grease the wheels of social interaction.
This social networking information provides us a window into these age-old friend networks and allows us to bring activism to the online sphere in a way that has not been done before. Because the underlying social relationships are the core of individual engagement and activism, the better we can understand and facilitate them going forward, the more successful we will be in engaging people on a large scale.
With this in mind, the decision to build social networking applications becomes more intuitive. We’re trying to help people motivate and recruit their friends to causes they care about, so we need to be in the places where friends are interacting and expressing themselves. Online, those places are the social networking sites.